Sticky Postings

Friday, February 16. 2018

For years, Alejandro Asensi travelled to Juggers around the world to complete his the "I am Jugger" documentary. Interviews with Jugger players and Jugger community brains of many countries and insights into many international tournaments shed a brilliant light on the complexity of this unusual sport.
Enjoy!

Thursday, November 23. 2017

The Uhu published a "Behind the scenes" of the movie that is responsible for Jugger, including some background information the screenwriter and director gave him when he worked on his first Jugger book twelve years ago.
Watch it here:

Friday, July 7. 2017

The time has come! The first Austrian Jugger tournament will take place on the 26th of August in Vienna!

Jugge Vienna invites to the 1st Austrian Jugger Open. Our club has never been that active before and after our first tournament (the First jugger.cz Open) in Brno we decided to organize our own tournament.

Unfortunately we had to set the date at the same time as the Latvian Jugger Open - we would have loved to use any other date, but this was not possible. But hope for a lot of motivated teams! There are enough to fill both tournaments

We are (as far as we know) the only club in Austria who plays Jugger und we would be SO happy to welcome a lot of international guests in our beautiful city!

Monday, February 27. 2017

I always disliked the clumsy naming of the Juggermasters who introduced Jugger to a country. "Juggermaster - Founder" or "founding Juggermaster" just doesn't sound right. "Grandmaster" might be appropriate but tastes of an order and just sounds ... grand. See here. Alpha is reserved for David Webb peoples as the actual father of Jugger.
But since we play a sport that bases on a post-apocalyptic movie, I just got the idea from a Fuel Rat comment saying that the founder of the Rats would be "Rat Zero", since the idea has spread like a positive disease based on his initiative.

So why not rename this "position" as "Juggermaster Zero", "Jugger Zero" in short, the one where the addiction started spreading. A term that I think is much more pleasing, and also inspiring for design and graphics purposes.
... and it sounds cool.

Thursday, April 28. 2016

Introduction
Hello, fellow Juggers! We’re the co-instigators of Jugger California, and we’re overjoyed to have this opportunity to introduce our colorful group to the Jugger-verse.

How did we get started?
We were introduced to Jugger by Pink Pain back in 2009---Valkyrie was on an academic exchange in Darmstadt for a few months, and saw some people doing weird stuff in a field. Later in the summer, Evan came to visit and got hooked, as well.

Five years later, we finally decided to make two sets of pompfen. We didn’t really have much to go on: some old Australian rules we’d found online plus some German pompfen specs, all referring to mythical materials like “20 mm PVC” that had to be translated into Imperial measurements. In true Berkeley fashion, we decided to break with post-apocalyptic tradition and go for bright neon colors:

Soon thereafter, we had our first game! With just seven attendees, we had enough for a stone counter and two teams of three.

What rules do we play by?
As one of the more recently formed groups out there, we introduce a lot of new players to the game. For us, the goal is to get newcomers playing within 5 minutes! Our quick explanation goes something like this:

For our regular practices, we don’t keep score or track 100 stone halves---we just play until we’re Juggered out! This may change as more teams pop up around the Bay Area (hello, San Francisco!) but for now it suits our “get as many people playing Jugger as possible” approach
Development?
In the 21 months since the fateful day (OK, two weekends) that we built our pompfen, we started an on-campus group at the University of California, Berkeley (called the Ursae Majoris), competed in our first tournament (the 2015 Mile High International in Denver), brought Jugger twice to each of two games/art festivals in the Bay Area (Come Out & Play Festival, and Figment), and hosted our first local game day (featuring the Riot, the Ursae Majoris, and San Francisco’s Juggernauts)...and with rumors of at least two more groups possibly starting later this year, we’re on track to become the next big Jugger hub in America.

We’re also a very creative group! Those of you who stuck it out to the rainy end at MHI 2015 will remember the Blood of Heroes (a beety, bright red ale), which several of our players helped brew. We have the infamous peace-symbol shirts, Jugger weapon cookie cutters, Photoshopped event images for our special sessions (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas), a featured Instructable about our weapon construction, and some special surprises for our first international tournament appearance later this year.

The 2015 MHI was a pivotal moment for our group (thanks to the Colorado Jugger League for organizing!). We came back with heaps of tips on pompfen construction, training exercises/games, and in-game strategy---many thanks in particular to the Dropbears and Wild Geese for picking apart our gameplay and making some excellent suggestions for improvement!

For the future: we’d love to see a group in the South Bay, as several of our players currently take the hour-long drive up to play with us. We’re planning a trip to the Swedish tournament this year, as well as the 2017 tournament in Australia. Play-wise, we’re slowly incorporating more and more of the training games we learned at 2015 MHI, while keeping the bulk of our practices centered around playing the game itself.

Tuesday, March 29. 2016

How did you get the idea of a Jugger TTG?
I have been designing my own skirmish style game system for the last 20 years or so. Initially I was hoping for a more medieval / fantasy battle style game but as it progressed it showed that it was more suited to a smaller scale skirmish type of game. When I started playing Jugger I wanted to learn how to win. It was really clear to me that, even though I maybe ok in the duelling I had to learn the team tactics and strategy.
So I created a miniature Jugger field and made some player tokens so that I could start forming strategies.
It was then that the spark of inspiration hit and I started to blend my game system with Jugger!! I showed it to the other Juggers here in Australia and they loved it but it was still very rough and needed lots of work. But all the Juggers got in behind it and helped make it a reality.

Does the scale the testing and participation of the Jugger community surprise you, did you hope for it, and is it according to your expectations?I have been totally amazed at the Jugger community. I don't think I have ever encountered before a community that have been so passionate and enthusiastic about their favorite sport and hobby. I was expecting that it would take a year to prepare, but with the Juggers involved Jugger TTG is ready to launch in under 6 months!

Since when do you play Jugger?I have been playing Jugger since 2014. I wanted to play to practice my Arnis skills, so I was intent on becoming a dual short specialist. But an injury meant that I had to keep with a double handed pompfen. When I am duelling 1 on 1 I like to use the q-tip ... but when playing I prefer the long sword. As I have discovered recently I also am a good qwik because the Australian rules have a strong wrestling component to start a point.

Do you have a team, team name?
We are the Highland Dragons

Did Tai Chi somehow help you in Jugger, parallels etc
Tai Chi has the Jian sword form, so yes it has helped. But I have also trained in Arnis which has also helped. Add to that all the other weapons training I have done as well including Wushu staff.

Do you plan to take part in tournaments, and do you plan to travel with your TTG abroad?
Absolutely! If the Kickstarter campaign goes well we plan to visit all the Jugger over the world and make new editions and expansions! Maybe a Swedish expansion

Where to meet you or folks with test-playing boxes (of the finished game) abroad?
As mentioned, we plan to visit the Juggers personally. If all goes well we hope to be in Ireland for their tournament and for the DM as well.

Plans for the future in Jugger?
I would like Jugger to become a household name in the world of Jugger and also a highly recognized and loved game for tabletop gamers across the world. What we have on the planning table is to do 2 releases of new players every year based on the current top players and tournament winners across the world.
Somewhere down the line I would like to have good resin miniatures of the main heroes and maybe even look at a Jugger digital game for ios or pc.
We can hope and dream yes?